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IndiAfrica Festival promotes innovative ideas from young entrepreneurs

31st May 2013

By: Keith Campbell

Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

  

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The final of the IndiAfrica 2013 Business Venture Competition, aimed at young entrepreneurs in Africa and India, recently took place at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, as part of the IndiAfrica Festival. The final involved four teams from Africa and another four from India, with one team from each group selected as Grand Prize winners.

Mentors from industry were assigned to each team. They all made their final presentations to a panel of African and Indian professionals.

The African teams came from Kenya, Nigeria (two) and South Africa, and the African winner was one of the Nigerian teams, Jorsey Ashbel Farms, which was mentored by Accenture Nigeria CEO Niyi Yusuf. The Indian winner was Team Life Catalyst Technologies. Its mentor was Hexolab Technologies CEO Raja Manohar. (Hexolab is based in Chennai, India.) Each of the two winning teams was awarded a grand prize of an all-expenses-paid trip to Davos in January next year during the World Economic Forum annual meeting, where they will be able to market their concepts to potential investors and business leaders from all over the world.

“What we are trying to do is to encourage people, and the youth, in particular, to become more of job creators than job seekers, whether in the commercial sector or others,” explains cofounder of IndiAfrica Sudhir John Horo. (Horo’s company – Ideaworks Design & Strategy – organised the IndiAfrica Business Competition with the support of the Public Diplomacy Division of the Indian Foreign Ministry.) “We want to create links between the two sides (India and Africa) and create opportunities and online communities to facilitate a continuous exchange of ideas. There are 15 000 African students in New Delhi alone – we had focus group discus- sions with them and realised that their engagement with India was not high. So we have started a series of collaborative workshops at campus level in India.”

The idea is to stimulate young entrepreneurs in both Africa and India and to build connections between them across the Indian Ocean. “We are trying to enter people’s minds and give them a better understanding of other cultures,” he elucidates.

“You can’t develop sound business without understanding other cultures. There is substantive learning that happens at all IndiAfrica forums.”

At a press conference held early in May, to highlight IndiAfrica 2013, Indian High Commissioner to South Africa Virendra Gupta noted that, during the festival, “[y]oung people will be able to develop their business ideas . . .”. “One of the programmes is for young entrepreneurs. Our trade is growing rapidly. There are huge [India-Africa] investment flows. Why should the young people not be part of them?”

The winning plan from Jorsey Ashbel Farms involved cheap, healthy, culturally suitable Nigerian livestock feeds. In particular, they developed new feeds using mango seeds. As a result, they can produce livestock products (including meat) that are 40% to 60% cheaper than those from farms using regular feeds. This makes meat more accessible to poorer consumers.

Team Life Catalyst Technologies, which comes from the Indian Institute of Tech- nology Madras, has a biotechnology focus.

The team seeks to produce innovative products and the current project is a simple-to-use and low-cost blood glucose sensor, the Rubellite Glucose Sensor. This is intended to help Indian diabetics monitor their blood glucose levels.

The institutional partners for the Business Venture Competition were the University of the Witwatersrand Business School and the Indian School of Business, in Hyderabad. Financial support came from the Public Diplomacy Division of India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

The festival also includes fashion, design, music, photography, poster design, essay writing, cinema, animated film-making and visual arts programmes. There was also “a whole lot of interaction on campuses at the level of the universities”, reported Gupta.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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